Fantastically Wrong: The Weird, Kinda Perverted History of the Unicorn

This woman is a virgin. How do I know? Because unicorns ain’t got time for no non-virgins.

In late 2012, the North Korean regime made a rather bizarre announcement, even by the standards of the North Korean regime. According to The Guardian, the country’s archaeologists had discovered “the lair of one of the unicorns ridden by the ancient Korean King Tongmyong,” just 600 feet from a temple in the capital city. What might have tipped the scientists off was, no joke, the words “Unicorn Lair” written right in front of the damn thing.

But a week later, The Guardian ran a second article with a frank admission. “There is only one problem with the story,” they wrote. “It isn’t exactly true.” North Korea’s claim was in fact referring to the kirin, a mythical creature not too dissimilar from the unicorn, with the same hoofed, quadruped look but sometimes having two horns instead of one. But eccentricities of the North Korean regime aside, why is it that the unicorn, or a unicorn-like beast, pervades both Asian and European cultures?

On the Horn

If you’re looking to figure out how an ancient myth started to get out of hand, a good place to start is with the great Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder, whose epic encyclopedia Natural History stood largely as fact for some 1,600 years. Problem was, Pliny wasn’t the most incredulous of writers, and crammed his encyclopedia with pretty much any account he could get his hands on.

A father and son pose with a kirin statue at the Summer Palace in Beijing, China.

“The unicorn,” Pliny wrote, “is the fiercest animal, and it is said that it is impossible to capture one alive. It has the body of a horse, the head of a stag, the feet of an elephant, the tail of a boar, and a single black horn three feet long in the middle of its forehead. Its cry is a deep bellow.”

The unicorn then shows up in various places in the Bible, at least according to some translations (it’s sometimes instead referred to as the oryx, a kind of antelope whose antlers were indeed sold as unicorn horns in medieval times, or as the auroch, a massive type of cattle that went extinct in the 17th century). Here, its fierceness is affirmed. In Numbers 24:8, for instance: “God brought him forth out of Egypt; he hath as it were the strength of an unicorn: he shall eat up the nations his enemies, and shall break their bones, and pierce them through with his arrows.”

In the 7th century, the scholar Isidore of Seville chimed in, noting that the unicorn “is very strong and pierces anything it attacks. It fights with elephants and kills them by wounding them in the belly.” He also helped popularize the myth that would serve as a hallmark in European folklore for centuries to come: Catching a unicorn is impossible…unless you have access to a virgin woman. “The unicorn is too strong to be caught by hunters,” he writes, “except by a trick: If a virgin girl is placed in front of a unicorn and she bares her breast to it, all of its fierceness will cease and it will lay its head on her bosom, and thus quieted is easily caught.” It’ll suckle until it’s lulled to sleep. So…yeah.

This is one alarm that the unicorn shan’t be sleeping through.

The scene (above) is one of the most iconic images in wildly popular medieval books known as bestiaries, encyclopedias of sorts that cataloged nature’s beasts, both real and imagined. Not only was the natural history of the animal given, but each was then compared to a biblical figure. And the unicorn stood for Christ, since he was captured and put to death like the unicorn is done in by the virgin (though pretty much every other animal was also compared to Christ, even the pelican, which was said to peck at its own breast to revive its young with blood, like Jesus shed his own blood for us).

Thus the unicorn became firmly implanted in European lore. What followed was a full-blown mania for their horns, which were said to detect poison if you stirred them around in your food or drink. They went for tens of thousands of dollars in today’s money, and were particularly popular among paranoid royalty. More industrious users who didn’t want to wait around to have their food poisoned would grind up the horns—usually those of the oryx or narwal (whose horn is actually a giant tooth)—to gain immunity from toxins.

Over in the East, royalty had a rather more complicated relationship with their version of the unicorn, the aforementioned kirin, or qilin. Its appearance was said to foretell the birth of a royal baby, which is nice of it, but can also predict an imminent death, which is not so nice. In the 15th century, a giraffe was brought to China for the first time and presented to the emperor as a kirin, which was a gutsy move considering its proclivities for letting royalty know they’re going to die soon. The emperor, though, dismissed it as a fraud and went on to live another 10 years.

This is what it looks like when an artist draws a rhino without ever having seen one with his own eyes…while maybe huffing a bit of glue.

A Myth Is Born

The myth of the unicorn may have come from sightings of antelope and such ungulates with only one horn, having either been born with the defect or lost the horn when scrapping with a predator or one of its own kind. Less likely still is seeing a normal antelope from afar in profile, since that would only last as long as the animal didn’t move.

A far more likely culprit is the Indian rhinoceros, and clues for this are sprinkled throughout the early accounts—indeed, the unicorn is sometimes referred to as the Indian ass. Pliny, for instance, mentions that the unicorn has “the feet of an elephant,” a rhino’s feet in fact being not hooved like a horse’s, but fleshy like an elephant’s. He also notes that it has “the tail of a boar,” much like a rhino’s, “and a single black horn three feet long in the middle of its forehead.” Writers would only later describe the horn as white.

The ancient Greeks and Romans, you see, had been making forays into India and bringing back tales of the strange beasts there, and the facts tended to get a bit…lost. Cotton, for instance, was said to grow in India as an actual lamb that sprouted from the ground, just hanging there patiently producing cotton. And while Pliny actually did a pretty good job of describing the rhino, his popularization of the “unicorn” picked up more and more improbabilities as the centuries wore on. We also know that the ancient Chinese had contact with rhinos from art made out of their horns, so the animal could well have also inspired the kirin.

Read more at Wired Science

Fantastically Wrong: The Bizarre Mirages That Once Scared the Bejesus Out of Sailors

The mysterious fata morgana: making people question their sanity since the beginning of time.

Jesuit priests aren’t especially known for their heavy drug use, but it would seem that Father Domenico Giardina was tripping pretty hard on August 14, 1643. Looking out over the sea from Messina, Sicily, Giardina saw “a city all floating in the air, and so measureless and so splendid, so adorned with magnificent buildings, all of which was found on a base of a luminous crystal.” The metropolis suddenly transformed into a garden, and next a forest. And then in a flash it all descended into chaos. Huge armies sprang forth, as did the towns they had laid waste to, before the whole mess disappeared.

Father Giardina, you see, was high on life. The “great and marvelous theater” he had witnessed was the mysterious fata morgana, an incredibly complex mirage that has historically both fascinated and scared the hell out of sailors and landlubbers alike. Whether it be the work of necromancers or fairies or a god, few phenomena have captivated humankind quite so thoroughly as fata morgana.

It was Jesuits like Father Giardina, argues Marina Warner in her brilliant book Phantasmagoria, who made the first “careful” observations of fata morgana, that is, not freaking out about them and instead beginning to apply a dash of science to the matter. The good Father claimed, writes Warner, that the minerals and salts in the region “rise up in hot weather in vapours from the sea to form clouds, which then condense in the cooler upper air to become a mobile specchio, a moving, polyhedrical mirror.” It was wrong, but it actually wasn’t that far off.

Light being refracted downward as it passes from air into a denser material, plexiglass. (Some light is also reflected upward)

At work here is some basic physics. When the sun heats up the atmosphere above the ocean, it creates a gradient of temperatures: Near the surface, it’s still relatively cool because the water is chilling that air, but sitting above that is a layer of warmer air. Now, light doesn’t always travel in a straight line. When it hits a boundary between two layers of the atmosphere that are different temperatures (and therefore different densities), it bends and travels through the new layer at a different angle. This is known as refraction. The change in the light’s angle of travel depends on the difference in density between the two layers.

How does bending light create a mirage? The rest of the effect is caused by how your brain works. When light hits your eyes, your brain assumes it arrived there in a straight path between you and the object reflecting the light. So if light is bent on its way toward you, your brain will think the object is where it would be if the light’s path was straight. This is why when you are looking down on a surface of water, objects under the surface will appear to be in a different spot than they actually are—just ask a spear fisherman…if you happen to know a spear fisherman. The human brain doesn’t automatically account for the refraction. (Interestingly, the brains of some birds like ospreys do correct for the effect so that when they dive headlong into the water after a fish, they are right on target.)

In the case of a fata morgana mirage, light reflecting from a distant object such as a ship is bent downward as it passes through the colder, denser air near the surface of the ocean (or sometimes cold land, particularly ice). But your brain places the object where it would be if the light came to you in a straight path—higher than it actually is. This bending effect can even work with the curvature of the Earth if conditions are just right, which is why some fata morgana images can actually be refracted cities and ships from beyond the horizon.

A superior mirage or fata morgana, left, and an inferior mirage, what you’d see on a hot day on asphalt, right.

The opposite situation is what produces mirages like an oasis of water in the desert. In this case, a hot layer of air just above the surface bends light rays up toward your eyes, causing your brain to perceive things as much lower than they actually are. The desert oasis is actually the sky. This kind of mirage is known as inferior, while the fata morgana, which places objects higher than they actually are, is superior.

But before the Scientific Revolution and all its wonderful advances in physics, mirages were firmly in the realm of mysticism (thank a Frenchman named Pierre de Fermat, by the way, for his pioneering work in decoding inferior mirages right around the same time Father Giardina was making his own observations). Indeed, fata morgana takes its name from Morgan le Fay, the treacherous fairy, enchantress, and half-sister of King Arthur.

Morgan le Fay: fairy, enchantress, sandal enthusiast.

According to Warner, the Normans brought stories of Morgan’s magic to Italy, particularly her penchant for luring sailors to an undersea palace with visions of castles in the air—fata morgana is particularly prevalent in southern Italy’s Strait of Messina, where Father Giardina experienced his own vision. Another Italian version of the legend has Morgan falling in love with a regular fella, granting him immortality, and keeping him in captivity, then putting on shows in the sky when he gets bored with the whole never dying thing.

And long before Arthurian legend, it could have been that sightings of these phenomena gave rise to any number of the “whoa something is appearing in the sky” scenes in antiquity, Warner argues. The Second Book of Maccabees, for example, tells of sky-people coming to the aid of the Jews in their skirmishes with the Romans: “When the battle became fierce, there appeared to the enemy from heaven five resplendent men on horses with golden bridles, and they were leading the Jews.” The ghostly warriors fired arrows and thunderbolts at the rascally Romans, “so that, confused and blinded, they were thrown into disorder and cut to pieces.”

Fata morgana’s most famous offspring, though, is the legend of the Flying Dutchman, a ghost ship said to sail aimlessly around the high seas. The tale was first popularized in a story called “Vanderdecken’s Message Home” from 1821, which told of a boat from Amsterdam that haunts the Cape of Good Hope, trying to hand off letters from its dead crew to the vessels of the living (uh, no thanks, the sailors would say, you can deliver your own damn mail). Warner connects this to fata morgana showing a ship from beyond the horizon: The mirage vessel could suddenly disappear with no explanation, and there you have your legend.

Read more at Wired Science

Fantastically Wrong: The Silly Theory That Almost Kept Darwin From Going on His Famous Voyage

According to the theory of physiognomy, this man in Giambattista della Porta’s De Humana Physiognomonia would behave like a dog because he looks like one. Kinda like Teen Wolf, only without the sick Ray Bans.

The other day I had what could be considered a bit of an … overreaction. On a crowded train during my morning commute to WIRED there was an old lady who looked kinda mean sitting with her purse splayed on the seat next to her. What a savage, I thought, someone should put her in a home. OK, I wasn’t serious, and there are of course worse offenses in the world, but in retrospect, what was interesting and admittedly kind of rotten about my reaction was that I judged her by her looks. She had a droopy face and downturned mouth, so clearly she must be miserable and mean.

It’s patently silly, but in a way it isn’t. We’re evolutionarily programmed to read our peers’ faces. For instance, a scowling, red-faced raging person is probably best avoided, if not getting roughed up is in your best interest. Good judgement could mean the difference between falling victim to a dangerous character and rightly keeping your distance and escaping unharmed. Not that I was afraid of the old lady. I want to be very clear about that.

A couple thousand years ago some folks were apparently so worried about all this that they thought up a little something called physiognomy—the “art” of reading a human’s personality in their face. Bird-like features meant a bird-like personality, and by using this system you could figure out who to avoid without even speaking to them. But this was no fringe movement: Charles Darwin himself was judged by the physiognomist captain of the Beagle and nearly barred from the voyage. And if you can believe it, there are still physiognomists out there practicing this bunk and charging people for it, making outrageous claims like you can tell if a person is wealthy or not by their nose (I’m not kidding—oh how I wish I were kidding). Weirdly, though, there may be a tiny bit of truth to ascribing certain personality traits to certain physical traits.

But first: a brief, weird history of physiognomy.

Saving Face

It was the ancient Greeks who pioneered the practice of physiognomy. None other than Pythagoras apparently “‘physiognomized’ the young men who presented themselves for instruction,” wrote the Roman writer Aulus Gellius, meaning that he inquired “into the character and dispositions of men by an inference drawn from their facial appearance and expression, and from the form and bearing of their whole body.”

The idea was that if you looked like an animal, say, a sheep, you also had its personality. And according to Jodie Jenkinson in her essay “Face Facts: A History of Physiognomy from Ancient Mesopotamia to the End of the 19th Century,” the theory “served a dual purpose, providing a measure for diagnosing illness and delineating character, as well as establishing a method for divination”—that is, predicting someone’s future—“based on physical appearance.”

I’ve got this feeling that Giambattista doesn’t particularly like what I’m writing about him.

Physiognomy was practiced here and there in Europe in the Middle Ages, but it wasn’t until the 16th century that the practice really blew up. For this we can thank the Italian polymath Giambattista della Porta, who according to Jenkinson legitimized physiognomy “as the product of natural science.” In his book De Humana Physiognomonia, della Porta presented often quite beautiful illustrations of humans and the animals they resembled side-by-side. The features of both parties tended to be wildly exaggerated to prove a point, and indeed Jenkinson considers the drawings to be one of the earliest forms of caricature in human society.

Mercifully, physiognomy was widely discredited by the end of the 1600s. But that didn’t stop a few rogue characters from continuing to explore it. In the 18th century a pastor named Johann Casper Lavater wrote a massive four-volume work on physiognomy, arguing that “one could better love one’s neighbor by classifying him according to his facial features.” For Lavater, who was apparently never told that it’s what’s inside that counts, physical beauty was an indication of moral beauty. He figured you could also read the wrinkles and creases in someone’s face, much like a psychic would read your palm.

Cesare Lombroso thought that you could tell a born criminal by their facial features. Oddly enough, he mostly chose ones that he himself didn’t have. Go figure!

Taking this one step further, the criminologist and accomplished racist Cesare Lombroso argued that you could pick a criminal out of a crowd by analyzing their features. Indeed, he argued criminals were evolutionary throwbacks, closer to apes than humans. By comparing them to “savages” around the world, you could tell if they were liable to fall into a life of crime. Just a few of the things to watch out for: “oblique eyelids, a Mongolian characteristic”; “the projection of the lower face and jaws (prognathism) found in negroes”; and of course noses with a “tip rising like an isolated peak from the swollen nostrils, a form found among the Akkas, a tribe of pygmies of Central Africa.”

And physiognomy even came damn close to altering the course of human history. Charles Darwin very nearly didn’t sail on the now-famous voyage of the Beagle—which informed his theory of evolution by natural selection—because the ship’s mercurial captain, Robert FitzRoy, didn’t like Darwin’s nose. “He was an ardent desciple [sic] of Lavater,” Darwin later wrote, “and was convinced that he could judge a man’s character by the outline of his features; and he doubted wheather [sic] anyone with my nose could possess sufficient energy and determination for the voyage. But I think he was afterwards well-satisfied that my nose had spoken falsely.”

You’d think that with such a rotten track record, physiognomy would be extinct today—and you’d be wrong. Take, for instance, the dazzling display of delusion embedded below. Not only does a physiognomist seriously suggest on national TV that you can judge character based on facial features, but that you can use physiognomy to determine how wealthy a man is before you start dating him. “The nose is the key,” she says. “And the larger the nose, the more spiritual or financial abundance. Mother Teresa of Calcutta for example had a huge nose.” I couldn’t make this up, folks.

Facing the Music

Here’s the weird thing, though. Several studies have found that there is a bit of correlation between how people judge faces and how the owners of those faces score on personality tests, though only for a limited number of factors like extroversion and conscientiousness. When shown pictures of faces, for instance, students have correctly judged the person’s personality more often than you’d expect with pure chance.

Part of what may be at work here is testosterone. Men with higher levels of the hormone, and therefore a higher propensity for aggression, tend to have rounder, wider, more “masculine” faces. While studies have shown that women prefer such faces in their mates—perhaps because they indicate good, strong, scrappy genes—we may also be evolutionarily programmed to be wary of these types of men. Thus would a snap judgement that a wide-faced man is aggressive be potentially true. It’s not sure-fire, of course, because anyone regardless of testosterone levels can turn out to be aggressive or not aggressive, but it shows that there may just be a little truth in judging people based on their faces.

Aw, that face. That mugshot. That trail of carnage Al Capone left in his wake.

Interestingly, this can turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we expect masculine-looking types to be aggressive, that societal pressure could in fact change behavior. The same goes for more baby-faced men: If we judge them to be more submissive, they could well just subconsciously give in and adopt that personality. As David Perrett of the University of St. Andrews told New Scientist in 2009: “Infants with masculine faces grow up to be children and adults with masculine faces. Parental and societal reactions to these cues may help shape behaviour and personality. In essence, people would be growing into the character expected of their physiognomy.”

The problem is, it can also work the other way around. A man with a baby face—Al Capone, for example—could subconsciously push back against the characterization of submissiveness and become a murderous bastard. (I’m not suggesting Al Capone became a murderous bastard because someone pinched his cheeks. It’s just a hypothetical.) Same goes for a more masculine-looking guy. Sick of being pegged for a meany-head, he could instead play nice.

Read more at Wired Science

Fantastically Wrong: Why So Many People Think They’ve Seen Ghost Dogs With Glowing Eyes

This one’s eyes are closed so you can’t tell that they’re glowing. Promise.

At the height of World War II, a four-year-old British girl was sent to bed but could not sleep. Sitting on edge of her bed, fiddling with its ornamental knobs and staring out the window, the girl heard a scratching noise. Then, out of the corner of her eye, a massive black dog appeared and trotted in front of her, turning its head to stare at her as it passed between the bed and the window.

“It had very large, very red eyes, which glowed from inside as if lit up,” she later recounted, “and as it looked at me I was quite terrified, and very much aware of the creature’s breath, which was warm and strong as a gust of wind.” But before it had reached the door, it vanished.

It was a hound that goes by many names: black shuck, the hellhound, black jack, gallytrot. Depending on the observer, it can also be white or yellow; it rarely speaks but sometimes laughs; every once in a while it’s missing its head completely; and a few have been known to shapeshift. And it’s not just England that the hellhound stalks—similar tales can be found all over the world. (I’ll be referring to it as the hellhound from here on out, because that best encompasses all of the versions out there.) But why is this myth so widespread? And how can we explain why so many people have claimed to have seen the hound?

This tale necessarily begins with the wolf. Humankind has had a long, complicated relationship with the beast, largely because before we’d fully ascended to the top of the food chain, wolves were a serious threat. But with time they warmed up to us. They’d hang around our fires, waiting for our scraps, while the bolder ones slowly edged closer. In time, we domesticated the wolf into the dog. Their wild brethren, though, remained hostile, and to this day have been known to attack humans (our attacks on them, it should be noted, have been far more frequent and devastating).

Don’t get much more majestic than the wolf. Except maybe a wolf with like, a top hat or something.

Fast-forward several thousand years to ancient Greece and the dog is firmly planted in mythology with Cerberus, the three-headed hound that guards the underworld. But this is far from the only association of dogs with the underworld, according to Bibek Debroy in his book Sarama and Her Children: The Dog in Indian Myth. “For instance,” he writes, “in ancient Persia, dogs were the preferred means of disposing dead bodies.” Elsewhere around the world, stray dogs resorted to scavenging—at times on humans—earning them an association with death.

However, Debroy notes, “this association with the afterworld or dead souls did not prevent dogs from being elevated to divinity.” There’s the ancient Egyptian Wepwawet, a dog-like god that opened roads to the underworld. The Aztecs also deified the dog as Xolotl, who carried the sun through the underworld. So just as our relationship with wolves was complicated, so too is our relationship with dogs the world over. We’ve feared them as creatures of the underworld, yet rely on them for companionship.

Alcohol and Other Factors That Just Might Have Led to the Hellhound

So that’s the cultural background, but what about the cause of the hellhound phenomenon? It’s worth relating another experience, this time from Simon Sherwood of England’s University of Northampton. When he was around three to five years old, he awoke to the patter of feet. “I looked up thinking it was my dog, but to my terror I saw a massive black animal probably with horns, but perhaps ears, galloping along the landing towards my bedroom. I tried to scream but I found it impossible. The creature’s eyes were bright yellow and as big as saucers. The animal got to my bedroom door and then vanished as quick as it has appeared. I then managed to scream and my mum came in to calm me down.”

There’s a very important clue here, which Sherwood himself quite rightly recognizes (he goes on to uncritically report other more paranormal and impossible potential causes of the phenomenon, but whatever). Not being able to speak or move while still seemingly conscious is a classic symptom of sleep paralysis, which happens when the brain and the body are out of sync during sleep.

Tales of ghost dogs have been floating around England for hundreds of years, and I’m willing to bet they’ll be around for hundreds more.
During REM sleep, your muscles are so relaxed that they’re essentially worthless (which, by the way, may be an evolutionary trick to keep you from acting out your dreams and injuring yourself). Should you wake up, though, and your muscles don’t immediately kick back into gear, you can feel paralyzed and probably quite a bit panicked. But soon enough it’s all over. This would explain why Sherwood was unable to scream at first, then eventually recovered his voice.

Some people like Sherwood even hallucinate and see a giant black dog, for example. But why would reports of the hellhound be largely consistent? Well, folklore is a powerful thing, even for a child, especially when it’s terrifying. Tales of ghost dogs have been floating around England for hundreds of years, and I’m willing to bet they’ll be around for hundreds more. Well, at least until we come up with a good treatment for sleep paralysis.

There are other stories, though, of wide-awake folks seeing evil dogs out in the open. An account from 1908 of an Englishman walking home from an inn: “I suddenly saw an animal that seemed to be like a large, black dog appear quite suddenly out of the hedge and run across the road quite close in front of me; I thought it was the dog belonging to the curate. I was just going to call it to send it home, when it suddenly changed its shape, and turned into a black donkey standing on its hind legs. This creature had two glowing eyes, which appeared to me to be almost as big as saucers. I looked at it in astonishment for a minute or so, when it suddenly vanished.”

Fun fact: Hellhounds love car rides, just like regular dogs. Except they fall out easy, because they’re ghosts and just kinda float through things.

Whether or not the man had tied on a few at the inn is lost to history, but I suspect as much. Experiences like this can be explained by … the existence of big dogs and the existence of alcohol and drugs. And those glowing eyes? They have a perfectly rational explanation as well.

Some creatures, including cats, raccoons, and dogs, have a layer of reflective tissue in their eyes known as the tapetum lucidum. This acts like a mirror to bounce light at the retinal cells for a second pass, greatly enhancing night vision. It’s responsible for eye-shine, that glow you get if you snap a flash at your dog or cat. And it’s not hard to imagine that it’s this eye-shine that gave rise to the myth of a hound with burning eyes.

Read more at Wired Science

Fantastically Wrong: That Time People Thought a Comet Would Gas Us All to Death

Halley’s comet in 1910 before not wiping out life on Earth.

On May 6, 1910, Halley’s comet approached Earth and killed England’s King Edward VII, according to some superstitious folk. No one could definitively say how it did, but it certainly did. And that wasn’t its only offense. The Brits also figured it was an omen of a coming invasion by the Germans, while the French reckoned it was responsible for flooding the Seine.

Yet there was even more apocalyptic hype surrounding the 1910 return of Halley’s comet, which is named for astronomer Edmond Halley, who calculated that the celestial body would appear on average every 76 years. Writing to the Royal Observatory, one worrywart warned the comet would “cause the Pacific to change basins with the Atlantic, and the primeval forests of North and South America to be swept by the briny avalanche over the sandy plains of the great Sahara, tumbling over and over with houses, ships, sharks, whales and all sorts of living things in one heterogeneous mass of chaotic confusion.”

Throughout history, there’s always been a bit of panic when comets approached the sun, burning off into long, ominous tails. But in the months preceding Halley’s flyby of Earth on May 19, 1910, folks got real creative with their anxiety. It didn’t help that a few months earlier, The New York Times had announced that one astronomer theorized that the comet would unceremoniously end life as we know it.

French astronomer Camille Flammarion sure knew how to part a head of hair.

He was a Frenchman named Camille Flammarion, and in typical French despair, he reckoned that as we passed through the comet’s tail, “cyanogen gas would impregnate the atmosphere and possibly snuff out all life on the planet,” The Times reported. Astronomers had detected the cyanogen in the tail using spectroscopy, which reveals an object’s composition by analyzing the light coming off it. “Cyanogen is a very deadly poison, a grain of its potassium salt touched to the tongue being sufficient to cause instant death,” the paper wrote. To its credit, though, The Times noted that most astronomers did not agree with Flammarion.

One skeptic was Percival Lowell, who noted the gas was “so rarefied as to be thinner than any vacuum,” and therefore posed no threat. Also stepping in was Robert Ball, director of the Cambridge Observatory, who noted that another famed astronomer, John Herschel, reckoned “the whole comet could be squeezed into a portmanteau.” In a hilarious response to the question of whether a comet should be shoved in a suitcase (turns out it’s actually 9 miles long), The New York Times hit back with a short piece that begins with a vocabulary lesson:

    “The rising generation hereabout may need to be told that ‘portmanteau’ is a word of French origin used in England to describe the useful article called in vulgar American circles a ‘grip,’ and among the truly cultured a ‘suitcase.’

    “If Sir John Herschel really said this comet could be packed in a suitcase (Sir Robert is not quite sure that the hyperbolical remark originated with Herschel), he was talking nonsense. The proposition suggests three factors—the comet, the suitcase, and the packer. The comet will soon be visible, and there are plenty of suitcases, but who will undertake the packing? We do not believe that comet could be packed into a suitcase. Experience teaches that mighty little can be packed in a suitcase by any man. It takes a woman to pack one properly. There are plenty of women, of course, but Sir John’s lighthearted assertion, now gayly step-fathered by Sir Robert, will not tempt them to do any unnecessary packing. A comet, once packed in a suitcase, or even in a trunk of the largest size, would be mussed beyond recognition and of no further use to anybody. Better leave the comet where it is. We shall all feel safer.”

Halley’s comet, as seen in its 1986 pass by Earth. And it didn’t even end the world…yet.

 Others also adopted a jovial outlook for the comet’s approach. “Tunesmiths composed songs to serenade the heavenly visitor, and poets burst into verse,” writes Ian Ridpath in A Comet Called Halley. “Products such as Bird’s Custard and Pears’ Soap featured the comet in their advertising: ‘Pears’ soap is visible day and night all over the world’ was one slogan.”

But other enterprising capitalists hatched more nefarious schemes. Fraudsters hawked anti-comet pills, with one brand promising to be “an elixir for escaping the wrath of the heavens,” while a voodoo doctor in Haiti was said to be selling pills “as fast as he can make them.” Two Texan charlatans were arrested for marketing sugar pills as the cure-all for all things comet, but police released them when customers demanded their freedom. Gas masks, too, flew off the shelves.

The spokesman for Hope’s completely worthless anti-comet pills was apparently a hobo.

 It’s little wonder, then, that some people were getting a tad riled up. Writes Ridpath: “A shepherd in Washington State was reported to have gone insane with worry about the comet, while in California a prospector nailed his feet and one hand to a cross and, despite his agony, pleaded with rescuers to let him remain there.” Churches found themselves packed to the brim with worried followers, while at home people were going so far as to plug up keyholes to keep out the comet’s vapors. (Sound familiar? If you think these people were nuts, remember that in 2003 our government told us to seal our homes with duct tape in the event of a terrorist attack. In 2003. The 21st century.)

More rational humans saw the comet for what it really was: A truly spectacular event that a lot of us see but once in a lifetime. As Earth passed through the comet’s tail on May 19, 1910, curious onlookers packed rooftops around the world, while the French—other than Flammarion, presumably—enjoyed special comet dinners. Indeed, Flammarion seemed to stick to his theory right until the end of the comet’s show, claiming that four observers “had certain olfactory experiences, which are described variously as a smell of burning vegetables, or a marsh, or of acetylene.”

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Fantastically Wrong: What Darwin Really Screwed Up About Evolution

Oh cheer up, old pal. You had one of the greatest ideas ever. So what if you got a bit of it wrong? Plus, you’ve got that sweet beard. Not all of us can have such sweet beards.

It’s hard to overstate just how brilliant and huge an idea Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection was and continues to be. It absolutely rocked Victorian England, to the extent that stuffy old Victorian England could be rocked past people just barely raising their voices in polite protest. But some folks, particularly highly religious types, weren’t too happy with the idea that nature can run perfectly fine on its own, without the guiding hand of a higher power. Not happy in the least bit.

But contrary to popular belief today, scientists were kicking around the idea of evolution before Darwin—even Charles’ grandpa, Erasmus, alluded to it in verse, like a true OG. Charles’ contribution was specifically the natural selection bit, that organisms vary, and these variations can better suit individuals to their environment, thus boosting their chances of passing down these traits to future generations. (Weirdly, Darwin’s friend, the brilliant naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, had arrived at the same idea independently at around the same time. The two presented their preliminary findings to the Linnean Society of London, before Darwin blew the lid off the whole thing with On the Origin of Species.)

There was a bit of a problem with all of this natural selection stuff, though: Darwin didn’t know how it, uh, worked. Offspring had a mix of their parents’ features, sure. But how? What was going on at the moment of conception? It was a huge hole in Darwin’s theory of evolution. So in 1868, almost a decade after he published On the Origin of Species, Darwin tried to plug that hole with the theory of “pangenesis,” a wildly wrong idea that goes a little something like this:

Charles’ grandaddy, Erasmus, a real gangsta.

Every cell in our bodies sheds tiny particles called gemmules, “which are dispersed throughout the whole system,” Darwin wrote, and “these, when supplied with proper nutriment, multiply by self-division, and are ultimately developed into units like those from which they were originally derived.” Gemmules are, in essence, seeds of cells. “They are collected from all parts of the system to constitute the sexual elements, and their development in the next generation forms a new being.”

Because both parents contribute these cell seeds, offspring end up blending the features of mom and dad. But what about a child exhibiting more features of one parent than the other? This comes about when “the gemmules in the fertilized germ are superabundant in number,” where the gemmules “derived from one parent may have some advantage in number, affinity, or vigor over those derived from the other parent.” In other words, they kinda just put more effort into it.

Gemmules must develop in the proper order to build a healthy organism. When something glitches along the way, though, you get birth defects. “According to the doctrine of pangenesis,” Darwin wrote, “the gemmules of the transposed organs become developed in the wrong place, from uniting with wrong cells or aggregates of cells during their nascent state.”

But most important of all, Darwin’s theory of pangenesis could finally explain variations among organisms—the raw fuel of evolution. This has two causes. First, “fluctuating variability” comes from “the deficiency, superabundance, and transposition of gemmules, and the redevelopment of those which have long been dormant.” In other words, they’re expressed in a grandchild after skipping a generation, though the gemmules themselves haven’t “undergone any modification.”

Darwin’s theory of pangenesis could finally explain variations among organisms—the raw fuel of evolution.

The second touches on a now discredited theory of Lamarckism, which argued that traits an organism acquires during its lifetime, perhaps because of environmental factors, can then be inherited by its young. Darwin believed gemmules could be altered during an organism’s lifetime, and these newly altered gemmules could multiply and supplant the old ones. (Lamarckism is dead, but some modern scientists argue that because behaviors like your language are acquired, this represents nongenetic inheritance that can change the course of an organism’s evolution. But it’s still quite a controversial subject that we needn’t get into here. Those interested should read this good primer on the topic.)

So to sum up: Gemmules are seeds of cells that you get when your parents conceive you. They must form in the proper order to build a healthy organism, and the way they mix results in variations. Some gemmules can lie dormant, resulting in traits that skip generations, or change over an organism’s lifetime, resulting in offspring inheriting traits that their parents had developed due to environmental factors.

Any theory needs a solid experiment, and that fell to Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton. To prove gemmules induce variation, he took the blood of one rabbit and injected it into another, with the idea that the offspring of the latter would show traits of the former. In his essay “Darwin and Heredity: The Evolution of His Hypothesis of Pangenesis,” Gerald Geison writes: “These experiments, like all that followed, failed utterly to confirm Darwin’s view; and when, in addition, the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters became discredited, Pangenesis was rapidly swept out of court by more satisfying explanations.”

Francis Galton, tester of theories on bunnies, and person of general sadness.

“As a result,” Geison adds, “Pangenesis has often been looked upon as one of those mysterious and inexplicable failures of genius. Perhaps because they wish to present only Darwin’s genius, several of his biographers fail to mention Pangenesis at all.”

I’ve said it before in this column and I’ll say it again: Being wildly wrong is perfectly healthy in science, because when someone comes along to prove that you’re wrong, that’s progress. Somewhat embarrassing progress for the person being corrected, sure, but progress nonetheless.

The real logic behind genetics was first discovered, oddly enough, by a monk and his pea plants in the 1850s, just as Darwin was preparing On the Origin of Species. By breeding these plants and recording how traits get passed down from generation to generation, Gregor Mendel noticed that offspring weren’t simply a blend of their two parents, as biologists had reckoned at that time. The offspring of a plant with smooth peas and another with wrinkled peas, for instance, wouldn’t itself have kinda-wrinkled peas, but either full-blown smooth or wrinkled peas. This is what we now refer to as dominant and recessive alleles, or versions of a particular gene: If you have blue eyes, for instance, you’re expressing a recessive allele, and if you have brown eyes, it’s the dominant trait. This happens because you get two copies of each gene, one from your mother and another from your father.

DNA isn’t actually this colorful in your body, unless you’re like a Muppet or clown or something.

“Hey dudes, I found this cool thing here,” Mendel may have said, to the deafening sound of crickets. No one gave a hoot about his work. It wasn’t until 1900 that his research was rediscovered by botanists, kicking off the age of genetics. Soon scientists had figured out that it was DNA that held the information that gives you your many traits, and in 1953 Watson, Crick, and colleagues finally gave it a shape: the famous double helix.

We now know that inheriting traits has nothing to do with gemmules mixing together. We of course get our DNA, which contains genes, from both our mother and father. But these are combined in unique ways at each conception, leading to variations even among siblings. Variation can also come from mutations: When our cells divide they frequently make copies of their DNA that don’t always come out perfect (you probably have a whole lot of mutations that you don’t even notice). So these mutations, combined with genetic shuffling at birth, drive variations and therefore evolution: Some individuals are born with traits that may suit them better to their environment, which boosts their chances of surviving and breeding and passing those genes to future generations.

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Fantastically Wrong: The Scientist Who Thought 22 Trillion Aliens Live in Our Solar System

Does Saturn have life on it? If you count gas as life, then yeah, sure.

In 1837, the Scottish scientist Thomas Dick had a big idea. A really, really big idea: Build “a huge triangle or ellipsis of many miles in extent, in Siberia or any other country.” He figured that because there are some 22 trillion aliens living in our solar system, 4.2 billion of which are on the moon, even if they don’t have telescope technology to spy the triangle, surely some would have eyes powerful enough to see it unaided. Perhaps realizing just what a big idea this was, he added, “Schemes far more foolish and preposterous than the above have been contrived and acted upon in every age of the world.”

Here’s what Dick figured. At the time, there were an average of 280 people per square mile in England. And because he thought every surface of our universe bears life, it would naturally occur at roughly the same population density. So from comets and asteroids to the rings of Saturn, if you knew how big something was, you could guess how many beings live there. Thus, Jupiter would be the most populated object in the solar system, with 7 trillion beings. The least populated would be Vesta, the second largest asteroid in the asteroid belt, tallying just 64 million.

Dick, you see, was a very religious man, but also a voracious scientist, one of the last of the so-called natural theologists, who looked for signs of God’s influence in nature. For Dick, it simply did not make sense for God to have created the cosmos just to have it sit around unoccupied. There must be creatures out there capable of enjoying its beauty, because God wants all his work appreciated.

Well thanks very much, Thomas. Nice of you to say.

In his book Celestial Scenery, which when it isn’t rambling is actually quite interesting, Dick writes: “This is a conclusion which is not merely probable, but absolutely certain, for the opposite opinion would rob the Deity of the most distinguishing attribute of his nature, by virtually denying him the perfection of infinite wisdom and intelligence.”

If you think waterfalls and sunsets here on Earth are neato, Dick promises you’ll be floored by what you’d see on other planets. “What should we think of a globe appearing in our nocturnal sky 1,300 times larger than the apparent size of the moon, and every hour assuming a different aspect?” he asked. “What should we think of a globe filling the twentieth part of the sky, and surrounded with immense rings, in rapid motion, diffusing a radiance over the whole heavens?” It’s a lovely image, isn’t it? These are also scenes we see realized in modern sci-fi—from a brain that was ticking fully two centuries ago.

You might think that living on other worlds might be difficult, but Dick assures us they’re arranged much like Earth, with mountains and valleys and such. The moon in particular has “an immense variety of elevations and depressions,” and while we can’t directly observe such features on Jupiter, Saturn, or Uranus, given their distance, when light hits them it reveals “the spots and differences of shade and color which are sometimes distinguishable on their disks,” thus betraying the uneven surfaces underneath. (We know today, of course, that these are all in fact gas giants.)

The gas giants aren’t really this close to each other. They have pretty big personal space bubbles.

God also provides atmospheres on other planetary bodies, “but we have no reason to conclude that they are exactly similar to ours.” Mars’ atmosphere, for example, is denser than our own, bestowing the planet that lovely red hue (it’s actually less dense). Others may be so thin that they allow their inhabitants to “penetrate much farther into space than we can do,” with the added bonus that such an atmosphere could “raise their spirits to the highest pitch of ecstasy, similar to some of the effects produced on our frame by inhaling that gaseous fluid called the nitrous oxyde.” Yes, he actually wrote that, complete with the superfluous “the,” like your grandpa decrying “the hip-hop” and “the reefers.”

There is, though, the rather glaring problem of the crushing gravity of a planet the size of Saturn. But Dick posits that “the density of Jupiter is little more than that of water, and that of Saturn about the density of cork.” Jupiter, therefore, would have a gravity only twice as great as Earth’s—not so terrible in the grand scheme of things.

For as bizarre as all this may seem, notice how scientific Dick was about his theory. This was not mere daydreaming. He had numbers, and he had principles, and with them he formulated a wildly wrong idea, but nevertheless pieced it together fairly logically. And he wasn’t even the first scientist to argue that life existed elsewhere in our solar system. Far from it: It was none other than the famed astronomer William Herschel who argued that not only was there life on every planet, but on the sun as well. That blinding glow we see is simply a luminous atmosphere hiding a rocky surface that teemed with life.

And oddly enough, it was Herschel’s son John who indirectly eclipsed Dick in an epic way.

The Great American Tradition of Newspapers That You Can’t Even Remotely Trust

According to Paul Collins in his book Banvard’s Folly: Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn’t Change the World, on August 21, 1835, the New York Sun dropped a bombshell of a story: Astronomer Sir John Herschel had erected an enormous telescope in South Africa that could magnify celestial bodies an astounding 42,000 times. And when he pointed it at the moon he saw a field of poppies.

It was all just a hoax, but the issue sold like mad. And so, four days later, the paper dropped another bombshell: Herschel next saw bison on the moon. And not just bison, but monsters of “bluish lead color, about the size of a goat, with a head and beard like him, and a single horn, slightly inclined forward from the perpendicular.” Not only that, but bipedal beavers as tall as humans. Based on the Sun’s account, Collins describes them “skating gracefully among their villages of tall huts, which all had chimneys, showing them to be acquainted with the use of fire.”

Then on August 28th came the kicker. Herschel had spotted humans up there on the moon—4-foot-tall humans “with short and glossy copper-colored hair, and had wings composed of a thin membrane,” the Sun reported. They had built giant sapphire pyramids, and apparently had a fondness for cucumbers. Perhaps more importantly for the hoaxster journalists—Richard Adams Locke (a descendent of philosopher John Locke) and Sun publisher Moses Beach—The New York Times and New York Evening Post endorsed the claims as entirely plausible. So it seemed a good a time as any for the men to compile their stories into a book: Great Astronomical Discoveries Lately Made by Sir John Herschel at the Cape of Good Hope, 60,000 copies of which sold out in a flash.

Notice the whatcha thinkin bout bat person at lower left.

Locke eventually made the mistake of confiding his secret to a journalist friend (as if you needed another reminder not to trust journalists with secrets), and the whole thing fell to pieces. The Sun, ever the champion of the public good, claimed, no joke, that it was actually all a public service… to get the nation to stop worrying so much for a second about that whole slavery thing.

John Herschel, supposed discoverer of life on the moon and a 24/7 party animal.

Dick died in 1857, and his books on the many beings of the universe went out of print not long after, due at least in part, according to Collins, to the fact that “Dick’s narrative became almost less credible than Locke’s.” The compiled newspaper hoaxes went through five editions, the last published in 1871.

And just two years after Dick’s death, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. Dick’s brand of natural theology, long on the wane, would not survive it. Darwin had put forth a shocking theory (for Victorian minds, at least) that explained life as we know it without a creator. Even true scientists with strong allegiances to God, like Richard Owen, who famously battled Darwin’s blasphemous idea to his death, were snuffed by the intellectual tsunami that was evolution by natural selection.

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Fantastically Wrong: Why Is the Sky Blue? It’s Packed With Sexy Energy, of Course

I know of a simple box that can radically improve your health, a device so powerful that the FDA once banned it and condemned its inventor to prison. But luckily, and quite graciously, its design has been left unpatented, free for all who might care to harness the mysterious “orgone energy” that pervades our universe. You can even get the 175-page instruction manual as a PDF here.

First things first: Your Orgone Energy Accumulator, as it’s known, must be big enough to comfortably seat a human being, and if you’re able to bury it in the soil, all the better, for the dirt only enhances the effects of the orgone. Its walls must consist of alternating layers of a metallic and a non-metallic substance, say steel wool and cotton. And the inner surface of the device must be bare metal of some sort.

When you’re done, simply enter the box, shut the door behind you, and take a seat. After a few minutes your skin will begin to tingle, and you’ll feel a sort of warming. Your heart rate will stabilize at a Goldilocks pace—neither too high nor too low. You will feel, in a word, enlivened. But take care not to stay too long. The minute you begin to feel nauseated, make your exit, for your body has been charged to capacity with orgone.

In the strange and colorful history of pseudoscience, Wilhelm Reich’s “discovery” of orgone—a substance that’s not only a life force, but indeed makes up the very fabric of space—must surely be a watershed. This is a story of a man who went from psychoanalysis wunderkind to enemy of Hitler to enemy of the US government, only to die a lonely death in prison. Yet somehow, almost a century later, his bonkers ideas live on.

How to Piss Off Hitler: A Case Study

Reich was born in Austria in 1897, and rode the rising wave of the psychoanalysis discipline in the early 20th century under the wing of his mentor, none other than Sigmund Freud, according to Martin Gardner in his book Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. He was a devout Marxist, and argued that the proletariat was so politically impotent because the workers were sexually repressed. Revolution, Reich claimed, could only happen with an uninhibited release of sexual urges. (It’s helpful, therefore, to think of him as Freud meets Lenin meets Larry Flynt.)

An Orgone Energy Accumulator, pictured here with a nice soft focus that really only makes it that much creepier.

Moscow rejected his views as “rubbish,” but more importantly the Nazis took exception to Reich’s claims that like the proletariat, German fascists also suffered from sexual repression. He wisely fled to Scandinavia, and it was there that he discovered orgone energy, which he compared to Freud’s notion of the human libido, only on a much grander scale.

Orgone is everywhere, usually manifesting as the color blue. So the sky is blue not because molecules in the atmosphere scatter blue light better than red light, but because it’s positively saturated the orgone energy. Same with the oceans, and “the color of luminating, decaying wood is blue,” Reich wrote, “so are the luminating tail ends of glowworms, St. Elmo’s fire, and the aurora borealis.” And those rippling waves of heat you see coming off a hot road? That’s orgone energy as well, moving west to east faster than the Earth rotates.

When it comes to organic matter, according to Reich the building blocks of life are not cells, but “bions” that he claimed to have observed. Gardner explains: “It consists of a membrane surrounding a liquid, and pulsates continually with orgone energy. This pulsation is the dance of life—the basic convulsive rhythm of the love which finds its highest expression in the pulsation of the ‘orgasm formula.’” So you and me are essentially made up of lots and lots of tiny sexiness. And these bions reproduce asexually by division, just like bacteria.

As such, a cynic may rightly argue that Reich was indeed just staring at bacteria.

How to Piss Off America: A Case Study

Reich relocated to the US in 1939 and set up shop on Long Island. A year later, he invented the aforementioned Orgone Energy Accumulator, which concentrates the energy that’s going to waste all around us. It was, as one of Reich’s colleagues put it, “the most important single discovery in the history of medicine, bar none,” a lofty statement that’s perhaps immediately invalidated by the addition of “bar none.” For bedridden patients, there was even a blanket version, a sort of dome with additional layers of material placed under the mattress.

That astronaut is glowing blue due to high levels of orgone. Or he’s just really sad. Hard to be sad on the moon, though.

The therapeutic effects of the Orgone Energy Accumulator were nothing short of miraculous. “In severe cases of burns,” a pamphlet on the device claimed, “experience has revealed the amazing fact that no blisters appear, and that the initial redness slowly disappears. The wounds heal in a matter of a few hours; severe ones need a day or two.” The box’s concentration of orgone can even sterilize wounds, plus treat colds, arthritis, ulcers, and, yes, even cure cancer if caught in its early stages.

“Do what now?” someone at the FDA asked in the 1950s. In his instructions for building an accumulator, James DeMeo, who founded the Orgone Biophysical Research Library in 1978, notes: “Reich’s orgone energy experiments attracted the hostile criticisms of many in the medical community, and a smear campaign in the press triggered an investigation by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).” Instead of trying to reproduce Reich’s experiments, the “bureaucrats relied upon gossip and rumor.” And in a “judicial ruling that is, to the best of my knowledge, unique in American history, the FDA sought and obtained a Federal Court Decree of Injunction, which ruled that the orgone energy ‘does not exist.’” In so doing the court banned books containing the word “orgone,” which the ACLU was predictably none too happy about.

Reich in his twenties.

Reich was also warned against selling the accumulators. The FDA ordered all orgone literature and devices destroyed, and according to DeMeo, attacked Reich’s lab with axes (whether or not they released great blue clouds of energy in the process is lost to history). Reich continued profiting from the accumulators, though, and the court found him in contempt of the injunction. He was sentenced to federal prison, where he died in 1957.

Yet the theory of orgone did not die with him. DeMeo published his instructions for building a Orgone Energy Accumulator a full three decades later in 1989, and there’s currently a “university”—if you’re going to be liberal with the term—called the American College of Orgonomy that’s somehow small enough to fit in a PO box in New Jersey.

Far from a fringe movement, orgonomy has tallied its fair share of famous adherents. William Burroughs apparently swore by the therapy, though you should keep in mind that as far as his judgment was concerned, he also once had his wife balance a glass of gin on her head, then proceeded to shoot her in the forehead instead of hitting the glass. And Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo once said in an interview, apparently in all seriousness according to the interviewer: “You probably know this very well, but your orgone energy goes out the top of your head and it dissipates out the top, but if you wear an energy dome it recycles that energy.” Take that one with a grain of salt as well, considering this is the man who’s responsible for Devo. (Perhaps by some sort of cosmic coincidence, the “Whip It” video features a woman shooting a can of beer out of a man’s hand.)

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Fantastically Wrong: Unicorns Dig Virgin Women, and Other Lessons From Medieval Bestiaries

The unicorn, perhaps the most famous of legendary medieval beasts, here in the embrace of a maiden who's like "Oh looks like you've got a little boo-boo back here."

Unicorns may be magical, majestic, beautiful, etc., but they have a serious weakness: virgin women. Indeed, ancient lore says that using a maiden as bait is the only way to snag yourself one of these elusive beasts. When the unicorn falls asleep in her lap, you can capture it, or if you’re feeling particularly plucky, run it through with a spear.

That was far from mere fantasy back in the Middle Ages, though. The story was one of the more famous passages in what are known as bestiaries, gorgeous compendiums of creatures both real and imagined that sold like mad—second only to the Bible itself. While they were passed off as solid knowledge, bestiaries were almost always wildly wrong about the natural world. Nonetheless, these charming tomes were indispensable to the beginnings of modern science, helping lay the groundwork for the field of zoology as we know it.

Unicorn murder notwithstanding, bestiaries tended to hold a certain reverence for the natural world, ascribing the cleverness, not to mention vices, of humans to various animals. The beaver, for instance, was said to chew its own testicles off when pursued by hunters. And the asp could resist the snake charmer’s song by putting one ear against the ground and plugging the other with its tail.

Adorable little hedgehogs roll around on fruit to stick them to their quills. They’ll then store them in their den for the lean times.

Each creature usually was explained in just a few paragraphs, followed by an often lengthy moral tale to relate its biology or behavior to human beings. So in casting off its testicles and throwing them in the hunter’s face, the beaver thus relieves himself of vice and tosses it right back at the devil. By plugging its ears, the asp is unwisely resisting the word of Christ.

A few more examples of fantastical bestiary critters, which you can see in the gallery at top:

• To steal a tiger cub, a hunter must grab a bunch at once and make off on a swift horse. As their furious mother closes in on him, he drops a single cub, which the mother snatches up and takes back to her den. She thus returns to the hunter for one cub at a time, until he escapes on a ship, ideally with at least one left.
• The magical salamander was said to be fireproof as well as extremely poisonous, tainting wells and even fruit on trees. Indeed, when a salamander got into a river that Alexander the Great’s army drank from, 4,000 men and 2,000 horses supposedly grew sick and, no doubt weakened by the embarrassment of being bested by a salamander, keeled over.
• Crocodiles may be jerks, but they’re far from invincible. As they sun themselves on the shore, mouths agape, the serpent will crawl in and make its way into the crocodile’s guts, eventually bursting through the poor reptile.

For all of the popularity of bestiaries in the Middle Ages, strangely enough one wasn’t translated into English (most were written in Latin) until 1954: T. H. White’s seminal Book of Beasts. In it, White goes to lengths to emphasize that while bestiaries were wildly wrong nearly all of the time, they were in fact quite compassionate works, painting animals as creatures to be not only respected, but revered.

The fox was said to roll itself in red mud to appear blood-stained, then flop over on its back and hold its breath. The scavenging birds that come to investigate it are thus bamboozled (read: devoured).

Now, it’d be an understatement to say there was a bit of an illiteracy problem in the Middle Ages. Consequently, bestiaries featured incredibly vivid, lively illustrations that spelled out the behaviors of the various creatures. Above, for instance, is a fox, a “fraudulent and ingenious animal” that was said to play dead to attract and attack birds. A medieval illiterate peasant would have heard such a cautionary tale in church, for the devil metaphorically works in much the same way on humans. Thus was the bestiary a work of universal accessibility.

Such symbolism was so important in the Middle Ages, according to White, “that it did not matter whether certain animals existed”—the part man, part lion, part scorpion with probably some identity issues known as the manticore, for instance—but “what did matter was what they meant.” It was an era of intense faith that a higher power had created every creature with a meaning to be decoded by man, or in the case of plants, a clue that the species was meant to treat a certain organ. Known as the doctrine of signatures, this held that a walnut, for instance, could treat brain problems because it looks an awful lot like a brain itself.

The bestiaries can all trace their lineage to one masterwork: the Physiologus, whose anonymous author probably lived in Alexandria in the first few centuries AD. He or she dug deep into the animal lore of the ancients, combining thoughts of Aristotle, who was arguably the first true scientist (if you haven’t yet picked up Armand Marie Leroi’s fantastic new book The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science, do so immediately), as well as Pliny the Elder, who in compiling an encyclopedia of all Roman knowledge was sure to include epically fantastical animal “facts,” I guess just in case they turned out to be true.

Not only is the asp exceedingly deadly to humans, it’s far from easy to charm. When snake charmers try to lure it out of its hiding place, the asp will press one ear against the ground and plug the other with its tail. White’s bestiary translation notes: “Apart from men, asps are the only other creatures which do such a thing, namely, refuse to listen.”

The Physiologus was a huge hit. It was translated into everything from Syriac to Latin to Icelandic, spreading all over Europe and the Middle East and Africa. And when a scribe got his hands on it, according to White there was no reason he “should not expand his copy with interpolations” from later authorities. Thus the bestiary “began to grow like a living tree.” Later authors grabbed older bestiaries and tacked on extra bits. They cut things here and there. In the words of White, the bestiary was “a kind of naturalist’s scrapbook, which has grown with the additions of several hands.”

This went on throughout the Middle Ages until the 16th century rolled around, and naturalists started growing suspicious of the bestiaries’ claims. Then came along British polymath Sir Thomas Browne, science’s most accomplished party pooper, whose work Vulgar Errors ripped the bestiary’s many bizarre claims to pieces. Elephants do indeed have knees, he assured his readers, and beavers aren’t anywhere close to being capable of chewing off their own testicles. And in busting these myths, according to White, Browne “began to raise the subject of biology to a scientific level for the first time since Aristotle.”

Generations of natural historians followed Browne, trusting not in the strange moral tales of their forebears, but in direct observation. And in 1859, the science of biology tallied what is arguably its ultimate triumph with Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species. Far from the fanciful speculations of the bestiaries, science could now explain not only the deep biology of animals, but how and why they got that way.

Read more at Wired Science